The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana determined an injured seaman’s general maritime negligence claims against a leaseholder of his contract couldn’t survive summary judgment and granted the motion in favor of the defendant on Dec. 21
LLOG Bluewater Holdings LLC and LLOG Exploration Offshore LLC (together referred to as LLOG) filed the motion for summary judgment after Terry Gantt submitted his negligence claim. The lawsuit doesn’t detail which claims were related to which defendant, so LLOG raised the claims in their motion. Gantt only said he was going after general maritime negligence claims against LLOG in his opposition. Considering this, the court didn’t even evaluate LLOG’s arguments concerning the Gantt’s Jones Act negligence and unseaworthiness claims.
During the event in question, Gantt was working on a vessel when he said the air handling unit’s filter material interacted with the vessel’s heater elements that led to a fire. He said he was injured as he responded. While LLOG doesn’t own the vessel, Gantt said LLOG defendants are the leaseholder parties to the daywork drilling contract, so they were guilty of general maritime negligence.
U.S. District Judge Lance M. Africk
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LLOG responded with the motion and said Gantt’s claims have no way of holding up because he can’t prove they actually owed him a duty, which is a crucial necessity to a negligence claim.
“The Fifth Circuit has ‘consistently held that a principal who hires independent contractors over which he exercises no operational control has no duty to discover and remedy the hazards created by its independent contractors,’” the court pointed out, via U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, who ruled on the case. It was LLOG Bluewater that hired Seadrill Deepwater, the owner of the vessel, as an independent contractor. Based on the daywork drilling contract, it was Seadrill that had the responsibility of carrying out offshore drilling operations. Still, Gantt said LLOG owed him a duty.
He argued they were responsible for guaranteeing the vessel’s equipment was safe. While the Fifth Circuit has yet to address OCSLA (Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act) regulations concerning offshore drilling leaseholders, the court did determine that previous cases could be applied and ruled that there is no regulation that determines LLOG owed Gantt a legal responsibility.
Gantt’s second point was that an agreement between LLOG and Seadrill proves that LLOG owed him a duty. Again, the court disagreed. “Although Gantt says otherwise, he was not a party to the bridging agreement, and he has not pointed to any evidence in the record that directly contradict the declarations provided as evidence by the LLOG defendants,” the court pointed out. Considering this, it granted LLOG’s motion for summary judgement add dismissed the case with prejudice.